Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of promoting the teaching of basic computer science in schools. The Raspberry Pi is manufactured through licensed manufacturing deals with Element 14/Premier Farnell and RS Components. Both of these companies sell the Raspberry Pi online. The Raspberry Pi has a Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip (SoC), which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor (The firmware includes a number of "Turbo" modes so that the user can attempt overclocking, up to 1 GHz, without affecting the warranty), VideoCore IV GPU, and originally shipped with 256 megabytes of RAM, later upgraded to 512MB. It does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, but uses an SD card for booting and long-term storage. The Foundation's goal is to offer two versions, priced at US$25 and US$35. The Foundation provides Debian and Arch Linux ARM distributions for download. Also planned are tools for supporting Python as the main programming language, with support for BBC BASIC, (via the RISC OS image or the "Brandy Basic" clone for Linux), C, and Perl. On December 17, 2012 the Raspberry Pi Foundation, in collaboration with IndieCity and Velocix, opened the "Pi Store", as a "one-stop shop for all your Raspberry Pi (software) needs". Using an application included in Raspbian, users can browse through several categories and download what they want. Software can also be uploaded for moderation and release.

GPU core: a Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU providing OpenGL ES 1.1, OpenGL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG 1.1, Open EGL, OpenMAX and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode. There are 24 GFLOPS of general purpose compute and a bunch of texture filtering and DMA infrastructure. Eben worked on the architecture team for this and the Raspberry Pi team are looking at how they can make some of the proprietary features available to application programmers

DSP core: There is a DSP, but there isn't currently a public API (Liz thinks the BC team are keen to make one available at some point)

256MiB of (Hynix MobileDDR2 or Samsung Mobile DRAM) SDRAM (or 512MB Mobile DRAM on later boards). The RAM is physically stacked on top of the Broadcom media processor (package-on-package technology). Here is a photo of the SDRAM (left) and BCM2835 (right) ball grid arrays on JamesH's finger. You are looking at the bottom side. The BCM2835 top side has a land grid array which matches the SDRAM ball grid array. Here is a highly magnified side view of the SDRAM stacked on top of the BCM2835 stacked on top of the PCB PoP stack (you can see why it's job that can only be done by robots!).